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Yoghurt COURGETTE Goodness CAKE

I had a free weekend this weekend! Yay! Originally I was supposed to go to a friend’s wedding but I’ve been so knackered lately, that I decided to skive off. I apologised, and planned to stay home and spent the whole weekend by DOING NOTHING.

Well, of course I didn’t manage to do nothing the whole weekend… but I managed to do nothing for quite few hours which is pretty good going for me.

And I had time to BAKE! It’s been a while since I baked something.

This is one of the “not so good things” when you are single and you like baking. There is no one to bake for! And if I was to bake only for myself, then I would weigh about 150 kilos in no time… :)

I wanted to bake something reasonably healthy, so I had a looong think, spend some time googling, and found couple of nice courgette recipes – I took the best out of each of them, changed and combined them all together and came up with my own version. And it tastes AMAZING!

If you are a chocoholic, like me, I will guarantee, that you will LOVE this cake! It is beautifully moist and very chocolatey. Yumm!

Yoghurt COURGETTE Goodness CAKE

To make it easy, and because I don’t own any sort of scales at home, I chose to use my yoghurt cup as my measuring cup. So, first empty your yoghurt and then, voilà, you have your measuring “cup” for this recipe.

You will need:

1 courgette

1 small plain yoghurt

1 and 1/2 cups of flour (I used wholemeal)

1 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup of cocoa powder

1/2 cup of butter

3 eggs

1 teaspoon baking soda

a bit of vanilla essence

a bit of cinnamon

a bit of mixed spice (I used czech “pernikove koreni”)

and some dark chocolate pieces (I used 81% – lush!)

How to make it:

1. Firstly you need to get your baking tin ready to make sure that your cake doesn’t get stuck. Butter the inside of your tin and then put some shredded coconut inside, tip the coconut around to make sure that it completely coats the butter, then tip the excess coconut in a bowl.

2. Now you need to beat (I used my new beautiful blender) the butter together with sugar until you get a smooth texture. Then, one by one, add your eggs. After you have mixed all your eggs in, add the yoghurt and mix well.

3. Time for the courgette! Roughly grate your courgette (with the peel on) and add it to your mixture.

4. And now we need to add the flour, baking soda, cocoa powder and also your vanilla essence, cinnamon and mixed spice, in your mixture and mix it all super well. Lastly, don’t forget to add the chocolate pieces.

5. Baking time! Make sure your oven is preheated to 170C. The cake will take about 50 minutes to bake. You’ll know when it’s done when your skewer comes out clean after you stuck it in the middle.

6. Is it done? Then let it cool down before you tip it from the baking tin and then… “tramtadadaaaaaa” ENJOY!

In order to save myself from eating the whole thing myself I gave a piece to everyone who I met today and EVERYONE loved it. My dad SUPER loved it and when I told him there was vegetable in the cake he was in a bit of a shock :)

That cake looks soooo decadent and healthy!! Yum!!! I totally feel the same way about baking- I’m put off doing it because i can’t eat it all by myself (/probably shouldn’t!). I’m living with a pastry chef right now too though so I’m also like, leave it to the experts…. I’m the worst baker! I can’t imagine coming up with my own recipe, that’s amazing! Unless throwing a whole bunch of random stuff in the slow cooker counts as coming up with a recipe ;)